What a Way to have Raised a Child

I wonder what sense a shrink might make of an author writing a biography of her parents and giving it the title Them. My parents were a little disfunctional, weren't they all, but Francine's were well beyond anything I've seen. Still, I've never thought of them as "THEM."

That their daughter turned out as well as she did should also teach us something, but I'm not so sure just what. But it's interesting that the writing about "Them" seems honest about both the good and bad sides of her parents personalities. "Them" are treated with love and respect, but also with both eyes open to their weaknesses as well as their towering strengths.

You do get the feeling that Francine felt that here parents were ignoring her. There are an awful lot of reports of being left alone while they went out. As she has said, this is not a book she could have written while they were alive.

A Memoir to Remember

Francine du Plessix Gray who, has written several fine novels as well as complex and satisfying biographies of the Marquis de Sade and Simone Weil, now tenderly explores the lives of her famously mercurial parents. "Them" is a success any way you look at it; the elegant writing and the loving way she examines the life she had with these completely self-absorbed people make this memoir worth reading.

Her parents were Tatiana Yakoleva, a renowned New York designer of hats, and Alex Liberman, who was one of the creators of modern fashion journalism at Vogue. The du Plessix in Francine's name comes from her birth father, a hero of the French Resistance who died early in World War II. Although he never adopted her, Alex Liberman was the father she knew and loved, the man she and her mother always saw as the one who rescued them from the horrors of war. Tatiana had already fled one revolution, leaving Russia to live in Paris as a teenager with her grandmother, aunt, and uncle. In her early 20s, she met the dynamic Russian revolutionary poet and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky during one of his visits to France. He wrote one of his most beautiful poems to her and begged her to return to Russia with him. But her fear was too great, and she married diplomat Bertrand du Plessix before Mayakovsky could return to again persuade her. Mayakovsky had been under growing scrutiny for his criticism of increasing oppression in the new Soviet Union, and he committed suicide shortly thereafter. His letters were one of the Tatiana's most carefully guarded items when she fled Europe.

Photos from the family's arrival in New York make them look like a tight-knit trio, but Tatiana and Alex were terrible parents. They shuttled off Froshka, as they called her, with all sorts of extraneous family and friends. A friend had to tell her that her father was dead. They failed to tell her when they got married. They were as ambitious and thoughtless as two people can be. But they loved her very much.

What makes this memoirs so remarkable is how warmly du Plessix Gray writes about all this. She does not see herself as a victim, which is probably why she has a close and healthy family life as an adult. Beautiful writing, fearlessness, and compassion make this a memoir that will hold readers captive from start to finish.

We cannot choose our parents . . .

"Them" is an engrossing read. Mrs. Gray portrays her parents in their full roundedness with no holds barred when it comes to revealing their faults as well as their virtues. In reading the memoir, I found myself saying "what fascinating people yet how obnoxious. . . how powerful an emotion love is to permit a daughter to see all her parents' faults and still treat them with respect." The book is also a portrait of a time and an industry (magazine publishing) and of people finely attuned to the needs of fashionable society. It's also about Change and how we all become outmoded when our work fails to meet changing fashions.